with its own distinct emotion. We may set beside it another description of calm in the Epilogue where the landscape is equally far and vast-a moonlight vision alive with streaming cloud and with the moving of the moon all the night long-a most beautiful thing, drenched with the silent loveliness of the universe.

Dumb is that tower that spake so loud,
And high in heaven the streaming cloud,
And on the downs a rising fire:

And rise, O moon, from yonder down,
Till over down and over dale
All night the shining vapour sail
And pass the silent-lighted town,

The white-faced halls, the glancing rills,
And catch at every mountain head,

And o'er the friths that branch and spread
Their sleeping silver through the hills:

The landscape is as far as it is fair, and it is immediately taken up, in accordance with the first method of which I have spoken, into his own soul, into his blessing on the bridal pair; and then inwoven with the coming child, and with the race of man. We might now think that this poet of wide distances would not be able to picture the quiet of a narrow and enclosed space; of a lawn and garden on a summer evening. But he does this with equal force and beauty. The poem (xcv.) beginning―

By night we linger'd on the lawn,

breathes with the peace of all the country-homes of England, and, even more, with the happy stillness of human hearts, of one another sure.

The storms described in In Memoriam are done

い

in the same way as these images of calm. The tempest of the fifteenth section begins with what is close at hand-the wood by which he stands at

sunset

The last red leaf is whirl'd away,
The rooks are blown about the skies.

And then, after that last admirable line which fills
the whole sky with the gale, he lifts his eyes, as before,
and we see with him the whole world below, painted
also in four lines-the forest, the waters, the meadows,
struck out, each in one word; and the wildness of
the wind and the width of the landscape given, as
Turner would have given them, by the low shaft of
storm-shaken sunlight dashed from the west right
across to the east-

The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd,
The cattle huddled on the lea;

And wildly dash'd on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world.

Lastly, to heighten the impression of tempest, to show
the power it will have when the night is come, to add
a far horizon to the solemn world-he paints the
rising wrath of the storm in the cloud above the ocean
rim, all aflame with warlike sunset,

That rises upwards always higher,

And onward drags a labouring breast,
And topples round the dreary west,

A looming bastion fringed with fire.

It is well done, but whosoever reads the whole will feel that the storm of the human heart is higher than the storm of Nature.

Tennyson always loved tempestuous days, and this general description of storm is followed by

many others of fierce weather. In lxxii. the whole of the day is wild, but here he dwells on the small and particular effects caused by the wind. The blasts "blow the poplar white"; the "rose pulls sideways"; the daisy "closes her crimson fringes to the shower"; the "burthened brows" of the day-that is, the looming clouds-pour forth winds

That whirl the ungarner'd sheaf afar,
And sow the sky with flying boughs.

Nor is the winter gale and the wintry world/ neglected. Stanza cvii. opens with the sunset and the "purple-frosty bank of vapour" on the horizon, and then the north-east wind comes with the night. Its fierceness, keenness, iron-heartedness, its savage noise, the merciless weather of it, pass from the woods out to the sea, and the moon hangs hard-edged over the passing squalls of snow. The use of rough vowels, of words that hiss and clang, and smite the ear, heightens the impression.

Fiercely flies

The blast of North and East, and ice
Makes daggers at the sharpen'd eaves,

And bristles all the brakes and thorns
To yon hard crescent, as she hangs
Above the wood which grides and clangs
Its leafless ribs and iron horns

Together, in the drifts that pass

To darken on the rolling brine
That breaks the coast.

The hand that wrought this winter landscape is equally cunning in summer and spring. The summer garden and the summer lawn of lxxxix. are steeped in heat and light. The lines "Im

mantled in ambrosial dark," "The landscape winking thro' the heat," hold in them alike the shade and blaze of summer days; and the joyous sound of the scythe in early morn is full of the sentiment of

summer

O sound to rout the brood of cares,

The sweep of scythe in morning dew,
The gust that round the garden flew,
And tumbled half the mellowing pears!

I give one more example for the brief perfection of the picture:

When summer's hourly-mellowing change
May breathe, with many roses sweet,
Upon the thousand waves of wheat
That ripple round the lonely grange.

As to spring, the poem is full of its wakeful charm, of its glad beginnings, "when flower is feeling after flower." The rosy plumelets that tuft the larch, the native hazels tassel-hung, the living smoke of the yew, the little speedwell's darling blue, the laburnum's dropping-wells of fire, the seablue bird of March flitting underneath the barren bush, the low love-language of the dove, the rare piping of the mounted thrush, are all phrases which tell how closely he watched her wakening; and when his heart is happy at the end of his poem, he breaks into one of the loveliest songs of spring that English poetry has ever made.

CXV.

Now fades the last long streak of snow,
Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick

By ashen roots the violets blow.

I need not quote the rest, but it is lovely throughout. Almost all the joys of spring, her scenery and its indwellers, her earth, and sky, and sea, and at last the springtide of his own heart, are vocal in its feeling and its art.

Finally, there is the landscape of memory. 니 another method of description, in which many happy and different aspects of Nature are gathered together, some described in two lines, some even flashed forth in half a line, and every one of them humanised by tender feeling-that feeling through recollection of Nature and his friend together which makes for every landscape its own ethereal atmosphere, half of soft air and half of soft emotion. Of this kind of natural description, so difficult, so rarely done well, so exquisite when it is at the same time brief and full, the two poems c. and ci., are most lovely and delicate examples, and every one who cares for poetry should possess them in his soul. Many also are the scattered phrases about the natural world which might be collected for their subtle simplicity, beauty, and truth; but I close this praise of the poet with only one, in which man and Nature are inwoven, and the way he wrote his poem enshrined:

Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.